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Request a DemoJay Chaudhary optimistic about Indiana’s changing approaches to mental health and addiction
When Jay Chaudhary became director of Indiana’s Division of Mental Health and Addiction in 2019, he was told to give himself six months to learn everything.
Six months later came March 2020, and everything changed.
The crises spurred by COVID-19 exacerbated many of the mental health and addiction challenges that Hoosiers were already facing.
Chaudhary is quick to note, though, that the pandemic also elevated everybody’s understanding of the need to seek help. The heightened awareness is also leading to policy responses from Indiana state government.
For Chaudhary, it’s a positive change. When he previously worked as an attorney for the nonprofit Indiana Legal Services, he provided civil legal help to patients of mental health providers. He witnessed the daily challenges they were confronting.
Now he’s in a position to enact change at the state level to alleviate some of those challenges.
Chaudhary this month spoke with State Affairs about the state’s new approaches to addressing mental health and addiction, including the creation of the 988 crisis hotline and mobile crisis teams.
“There are good reasons to be optimistic about this,” Chaudhary said. “We have everybody on the same page rowing in the same direction. I do think there’s a real case to be hopeful.”
The conversation is edited for clarity, brevity and length.
Q. Did you know how important your job was going to be when you took it?
A. Yes, I definitely had sleepless nights the first two or three months of the job because of the immense responsibility of trying to figure out how to build a system that helps Hoosiers who are in some of our most vulnerable situations.
But I don’t think anybody could have anticipated the corresponding impact that COVID had on these issues, not only from just a human suffering standpoint in terms of increased overdoses, increased mental health issues, but also like a spotlight situation. All of a sudden we’ve found ourselves in a situation where everybody’s talking about mental health. Which is fantastic, it’s wonderful, but then the task remains: Well, OK, now that we’re talking about it, how do we actually do it?
Q. What are some of the ongoing challenges tied to that period of COVID?
A. The truth is there was a massive disruption in how we live and work and interact with each other. And anytime there's a massive disruption like that, I think things that were bubbling under the surface, there's a chance they can come up front and center.
That’s what happened with mental health. We were already seeing, for example, massive increases in teenage anxiety and depression and increased rates of suicide attempts, especially for teenage girls. And I don't think a disruption like COVID helped that trend at all.
But I think part of it is that they could shine a spotlight on these things because all of a sudden everybody was dealing with some degree of mental distress during that time period — which I think has led to increased awareness and reduced stigma. Reducing stigma is the key to getting more people into the care that they need. The flip side of it is that reduced stigma leads to increased demand, and we have to figure out how to meet it.
Q. There seems to be a growing awareness and willingness among Hoosiers to talk about mental health and addiction. It hasn’t always been easy to talk about. Beyond COVID-19, what else is driving that?
A. We, as people and human beings, are the main characters in our own stories. When issues burst into our own little bubble, we’re necessarily going to start paying more and more attention to it. As a result of a lot of different factors over the last 15 to 20 years or so, addiction and substance use disorder were no longer something that wasn’t affecting most people.
We had legislators and executives and people from all walks of life out sharing stories about their cousin or their nephew or their brother or their sister or their son or their daughter that was affected by addiction. And you saw that all come to a head in the mid-2010s where we saw a long overdue change in terms of viewing substance use disorder as something that was to be met with a punitive and then carceral solution versus something that was a disease that was worthy of compassionate treatment and care.
That change is probably a long time coming and we can't overlook the element of now this is happening to people who are wealthier and more well-off and everybody’s dealing with it now. And so I think you’ve seen the impact of that attitude shift in terms of building up resources, in terms of building up attention, in terms of changing policies to make them more recovery friendly.
I think the same thing is happening for mental health. There was this notion of being stoic and sucking it up and just moving on and soldiering on. And now I think people are reevaluating that perspective and seeing that this is also a disease, treatment is available, treatment is possible. It's possible to get better and I think you're seeing the same sort of shift — and not just attitudes, but also corresponding policies and structures to help with this.
Q. You mentioned policies that are recovery friendly. By that do you mean policies that acknowledge that recovery often means setbacks? And giving someone more than one chance?
A. Absolutely, we always say recovery is not linear. Setbacks are common.
A big part of that is educating employers and other folks that look, if you have somebody who is in long-term recovery, first of all, recovery is possible. So this is not something that because they had a problem once, they’re always going to have a problem.
I think also that you see that trickle into the criminal justice sphere, for example, with drug courts. It used to be with drug courts it was one dirty drug test and you would be met with more punitive consequences. Now judges and other folks in those courts are a lot more compassionate and understanding and working toward solutions as opposed to being punitive in nature.
Q. Do you still hear from people who have misconceptions or misunderstandings?
A. From time to time. I try to deal with those folks with some compassion as well, because I think that those misconceptions come from a place of having been hurt or having been burned, frankly, by somebody who had a problem. It's not hard to see how you can harden your perspective in those situations. And so our approach with those things is always just let’s educate, let’s have a conversation, let’s see if we can come to some agreement.
Everybody more or less wants the same things. We want safe, healthy communities and opportunities for our loved ones and families.
Q. How is the 988 hotline coming along? What’s next for its implementation?
A. Thanks for asking about that. So 988 is the three-digit suicide hotline number that went live in July 2022. We’re approaching this by building a system in three parts.
For example, when you think about 911, you don’t just think about the number, you think about the police and EMS and emergency rooms. And so we’re envisioning a similar system for 988, where we have someone to contact, so that’s the call center — which also includes chat and text functions — but then also someone to respond, which are mobile crisis teams; and a safe place for help, which are what we call crisis stabilization centers, which are kind of therapeutic environments where folks can be taken in that aren’t the ER and aren’t the jail.
So that’s a three-part system that we’re working on building. Now, “building” is the right word — we have to build this up from almost nothing. It’s going to take a long time. And so the first part of that system was someone to contact; it’s probably the furthest along. We have soon-to-be five 988 call centers that are going to migrate to a single platform so no matter where you call from in the state of Indiana, you’re going to get one of these high-quality, trained call centers.
We’re also making progress on the other two parts of it. We’re going to pilot four mobile crisis teams that cover 15 counties in 2023, to see what we can do and learn from that process. We're also going to be funding several crisis centers where again, we can pilot, we can learn and we can ultimately build a system that works for Hoosiers.
Q. What is a mobile crisis team?
A. We've tried to maintain as much flexibility for local communities to build the team that reflects their resources and their actual needs. But we also wanted to maintain the presence of a peer on those teams because we strongly believe — and I think it's a pretty wide consensus in the field — that the presence of a peer of somebody who’s been through this system before or has been through this situation before is the key to rapport building and de-escalation.
What we've done is — with our partners in the Legislature — is say your crisis team has to have a peer on it, and then they could have one of the other professionals on it, like a police officer or EMS or social worker or a higher level clinician. And then it has to have clinical supervision. And so that structure kind of strikes the balance between local flexibility but also maintaining a degree of oversight and rigor in that process.
Q. In the last budget, state lawmakers directed $100 million in federal funding (through the American Rescue Plan) toward mental health. How was that money spent? Did we see positive results?
A. We’re still spending it. The nice thing about this money is that it will last us through about 2026 so we can be a little bit thoughtful about it.
The challenge with one-time funding is you don’t want to create those cliffs because you can pay for a bunch of services for a short period of time and then what happens? Sometimes we actually leave people worse off than before if you build all these programs with no kind of feasible path to sustainability.
But I think we’ve invested in some pretty thoughtful and smart, impactful ways. And I think that we’re constantly evaluating it. First is building sustainable infrastructure around the state. And so we’ve invested some of that funding but also some other funding in our 988 system in order to build up that infrastructure.
We’ve also tried to invest, in partnership with local units of government but also locally driven organizations, to increase access in their communities. Our big push there was our Community Catalyst grant program where we ended up spending around $30 million of this funding, but it was matched by almost the same amount of local funding to give grants to local organizations to provide services in a variety of areas related to behavioral health.
Another big push for us is workforce because ultimately without a behavioral health workforce, we’re not going to be able to get the outcomes and the access that we desire. So we’ve done things like invest in residency programs, we’re putting out another locally driven request for funding proposals for innovative ways to build the workforce pipeline.
Q. What is the business or economic impact of mental health and addiction in Indiana?
A. As part of the Behavioral Health Commission, which I was the chair of, we engaged a group of researchers from Indiana University to study the cost and impact of untreated mental illness on the state of Indiana.
And the number they came up with was $4.2 billion a year. Pretty remarkable finding. Just for context, that's more than the amount that corn — which is the signature crop of Indiana — brings in every single year.
It is manifesting in huge costs in various places: in the emergency rooms and jails, Department of Child Services, all of these other places. But I think if you step back for a second and if you look at the benefits side of things, a workforce that is taking care of their mental health and is able to access treatment when they need it and able to recover from potential substance use disorder challenges and setbacks is a much stronger and healthier one for Indiana employers and businesses.
We do see this as a big-picture quality-of-life issue. You want your loved ones who are in a crisis to be responded to with compassion and a therapeutic approach. You want your employees and your human capital to be operating at their full potential. And we think that one of many tools to be able to do that is creating a behavioral healthcare system where people can access the care when they need it.
Q. For regular Hoosiers reading this interview, what are a couple things they can do right now to help with some of these challenges?
A. In terms of stigma, I think we’ve made a lot of strides thanks to a multi-sector approach to really reducing and addressing the notion of stigma, but that doesn’t mean we’re anywhere close to where we need to be.
Having conversations in your local communities about mental health and also about the notion that it's OK to seek help, it's OK to seek treatment, is really, really important. And that’s something that we as a [state government agency] can’t do. That has to come from people and local communities and faith organizations and employers and schools and the glue that holds our communities together.
Have those conversations. Make it clear that if you are struggling, you should seek help. And also offer some trainings and education to folks about mental health literacy: What are some signs? What are some indicators that somebody needs help?
Our job at the state is to help create a system where people can access the care that they need, but ultimately we need people to be able to identify that they need help in the first place, and that's something that has to happen at the local level.
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Republicans rivals knock Mike Braun for possibly missing final governor debate
U.S. Sen. Mike Braun is facing criticism from other Republican candidates for governor over possibly missing their final televised debate because of scheduled Senate votes Tuesday on providing military assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
Tuesday evening’s 90-minute debate will go on as planned with the remaining five Republican candidates still expected to participate, according to the Indiana Debate Commission, the nonprofit group organizing the matchup.
“Braun’s campaign team notified the commission late Monday that he must be in Washington, D.C., for a vote,” the commission said in a statement. “Braun remains welcome to participate if the Senate votes — scheduled for 1 p.m. EDT — are completed in time for him to return to Indianapolis by the 7 p.m. EDT event start.”
Braun is regarded as the front-runner in the Republican race, and the debate gives the other candidates one of their best chances to stand out before voting ends in two weeks for the May 7 primary.
Braun’s campaign didn’t immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment from State Affairs about his possibly missing the debate.
The Brad Chambers campaign contrasted Braun’s potentially skipping the debate to vote on the military aid package to his missing last month’s Senate vote on a $1.2 trillion spending package avoiding a government shutdown several hours after attending an Indiana campaign fundraising event.
“Career politician U.S. Senator Mike Braun continues to insult Hoosiers and put himself first,” Marty Obst, senior strategist for Chambers, said in a statement. “He’ll skip votes in D.C. to collect checks at a campaign fundraiser but then use votes to skip a debate and hide from voters and his record.”
Braun’s campaign said he returned to his home in Jasper following a Friday-evening fundraising event and planned a return to Washington the next day for the Senate vote. But his campaign said the vote was unexpectedly held at nearly 2 a.m. that Saturday — and that Braun would have voted against the government funding bill that passed 74-24.
Tuesday’s debate is scheduled for 7-8:30 p.m. before an audience at Hine Hall Auditorium on the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campus. It will be televised by several PBS stations across the state and streamed on the commission’s website, indianadebatecommission.com.
Braun had support from 44% of likely Republican primary voters in a State Affairs/Howey Politics Indiana poll conducted in early April. Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch, Eric Doden and Chambers each received about 10% support.
Crouch campaign manager Liz Dessauer said in a statement that “Braun skipped a key budget vote to attend a campaign fundraiser, but now suddenly realizes he needs to do his job in order to skip the last debate?”
Long-shot candidate Jamie Reitenour, who is among those taking part in Tuesday’s debate, also knocked Braun for possibly missing the debate for a Senate vote while not missing last month’s government funding vote.
“He’s trusting that his $7M campaign spending will trump his disrespect for the voter!” Reitenour posted on X.
Tom Davies is a Statehouse reporter for State Affairs Pro Indiana. Reach him at [email protected] or on X at @TomDaviesIND.
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Holcomb says he’s confident of investments from Brazil, Mexico trip
Gov. Eric Holcomb wrapped up his weeklong travels to Brazil and Mexico by saying he expected new business investments to emerge from the trip. Holcomb told reporters Thursday night from Mexico City that he had many productive meetings with government and business leaders promoting Indiana’s agriculture ventures. “It really does remind me that face to …
Mike Braun on why he wants to be in politics ‘at a level of significance’
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one in a series of profiles of the candidates running for Indiana governor.
JASPER, Ind. — Mike Braun was a former two-term state representative in 2018 when he compared himself to the ultimate “outsider”: President Donald J. Trump.
Braun used that label to defeat two sitting congressmen in a Republican U.S. Senate primary race he had begun with about 1% of support in an internal poll. Then he used five Trump Make America Great Again rallies and $11 million of his own money (and another $20 million from an undisclosed donor) to upset Democratic U.S. Sen. Joe Donnelly.
“Here, we come in as a sitting senator — it’s a much different dynamic in how the political market is going to accept you,” Braun said of his current campaign, as opposed to the one he largely self-funded in 2018. (A conciliation agreement made public in late March revealed that the Federal Election Commission fined Braun’s 2018 campaign $159,000 for failing to properly disclose more than $11 million in transactions from July 2017 through December 2018.)
“I think we’re in good shape because we’re fairly solid when you look at the record I’ve got,” he said of the current campaign, in which he repeatedly invites Hoosier voters to examine his record in office. “Politically, this is less of a mystery in terms of what to do. We just need to execute in a similar way to what we did in ’18 and get the message out that will resonate with Hoosiers. I feel confident we’re going to be able to do that.”
Sen. Braun continues to bill himself as the “outsider” — along with former Commerce Secretary Brad Chambers — as he steers through an unprecedented six-person Republican gubernatorial field that also includes Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch, businessman Eric Doden, former state Attorney General Curtis Hill and Indianapolis mom Jamie Reitenour.
Normally, Hoosier Republicans coalesce around a single candidate for an open governor’s race, often turning a simple candidacy into a movement. But not this time.
Past Republican nominees and governors were not outsiders — they were ultimate insiders. Edgar Whitcomb sought the office while serving as secretary of state; Doc Bowen as speaker of the House; Richard O. Ristine, Robert Orr and John Mutz as lieutenant governors; Linley Pearson as attorney general; David McIntosh and Mike Pence as congressmen; Mitch Daniels as an outgoing White House budget director; and Eric Holcomb as a former aide to Daniels, U.S. Rep. John Hostettler and U.S. Sen. Dan Coats (before becoming a state GOP chair and then lieutenant governor).
Toward the end of the first homestretch debate at the Carmel Palladium on March 11, Hill wondered why Braun was seeking the governor’s office if his one term in the U.S. Senate had been so successful.
“I thought he was very well equipped for the job,” Hill said. “He talks about how tough it is in D.C. I want him to go back and continue the fight; he gave up the fight. Will he give up the fight as governor?”
Braun responded, “I spent 37 years building a little scrappy business into a regional, national and international company. And that is what I ran for Senate on. It resonated overwhelmingly. If you like me as your senator, you’ll like me better as governor.”
Throughout Indiana history, former governors — from Oliver P. Morton to Evan Bayh — found career-end refuge in the U.S. Senate. Braun is doing it in reverse.
“You know why?” he asked in his unassuming office at his company Meyer Distributing in Jasper. “Because they’re from the farm system of politics. The people who got done being governor just weren’t done with politics. They wanted to continue. My blessing is I did something in the real world first before I decided to get into politics at a level of significance.”
Asked if he is more of an executive than a legislator, Braun responded, “I feel I’m good at both because legislatively I knew what to get done as a legislator. I passed a unique regional authority bill that helped us down here on a road project we talked about for 40 years in the abstract. To me, if you’re an entrepreneur, you know how to get from here to there.”
During the Carmel debate, Braun called himself the “most fiscally conservative” Republican and a freshman who has been honored by independent groups for passing legislation. Chambers reminded him: “You’ve been in the Senate for an additional $7 trillion to $9 trillion in borrowing.”
Asked if he would like to make a rebuttal, Braun said, “I think I’ve got one,” while the audience laughed.
Braun is proud of his Senate record. “I base that mostly upon all the hard work invested as a senator, but a record that is generally resonating with Hoosiers and the fact that I visit all 92 counties each year,” he said. “Something you probably aren’t aware of, but we recently announced we’ve completed 11,000 cases for Hoosiers. We did that on behalf of veterans, immigration, Social Security and the whole spectrum of how you can get entangled with the federal government. That is one of the proudest parts of being a U.S. senator.
“It’s very important for anyone who wants to lead our state [that they’d] better be there with a track record,” he said at the Carmel debate. “You won’t have to figure out what they might do when they say they want to aspire to something like this. You need to be willing to flesh out those ideas. Of anyone on the stage here, I have the most recent track record on what’s happened, when you have to vote, what you’re really for, not what you say you’re going to be for.”
“I think when [Braun] talks about being a proven conservative, he’s served in the U.S. Senate for six years and has votes that can reaffirm that,” Laura Merrifield Wilson, an associate professor in the History & Political Science department at the University of Indianapolis, told State Affairs. “He had been in the General Assembly before that and could point to certain things. That’s going to help especially with your Republican primary in the state of Indiana, which is going to be very heavily conservative.”
Braun and the city of Jasper
To understand what makes Mike Braun tick, you have to travel to Jasper, a small city about an hour northeast of Evansville. “I have been blessed to be raised in a place like Jasper,” he said during the Carmel debate. “It’s a community based on faith, family, freedom and opportunity.”
Braun left Jasper to attend Wabash College and then earned a Master of Business Administration from Harvard University. He said many of his classmates went to Wall Street or Silicon Valley, but he headed back home. He bought what he calls a “hardscrabble” company — Meyer Body — and built it into a sprawling 1,500-employee national enterprise that distributes various products, from auto parts to industrial supplies.
“There’s no substitute about seeing the context of where you’re coming from,” the 70-year-old said last November during a walking tour of this 270,000-square-foot complex. “My major piece of work — you’re looking at it right here.”
In Hoosier politics, a candidate for governor most likely points to his public service record, which in Braun’s case is his 10 years on the local school board, three years in the Indiana House and five-plus years in the U.S. Senate. But he attributes much of his policy underpinnings to the seven acres in Jasper that are home to Meyer Distributing. It is a beehive of activity, with beeping forklifts and transporters shifting and loading product onto tractor-trailers while Aerosmith rock music blares in the background.
It was here 15 years ago where he pursued a new path toward providing more cost-effective health care options for his employees that has transformed his viewpoint on commodity-draining states and private industries. “I fixed health care in my own business, have healthier employees, cut costs 15 years ago, created health care consumers out of my employees and know some of the things I can do for coverage of our own state employees,” he said.
“We’ve got one of the highest health care costs of any state and some of the poorest health care outcomes,” Braun added.
Will that translate to 6.8 million Hoosiers? Can you take those fundamental building blocks on health coverage and bring them to the masses?
“Sure, you can,” he responded. “That’s owning your own health care and well-being. That’s basically what I did here. I gave the best tools to my employees to do that. I put skin in the game on their minor health care to where they shop around for the small stuff, and they’ve got the best coverage when they get critically ill or have a bad accident. Insurance companies told me all of that. They were making so much money on our plan back then I decided to self-insure and basically solved health care as most companies would love to do, but had to be entrepreneurial. I just basically took what the insurance companies told me, saw how much money they were making covering my business, created it as a cost center and not a profit center and that’s how I fixed things.”
What would a Gov. Mike Braun administration look like?
“What I’ll bring to bear as the governor will be someone who will be entrepreneurial politically,” Braun said. “To me, if you’re a good entrepreneur, politics is easier than building a business. It’s just got tighter compression in terms of the political hurdles you need to jump.”
On his campaign website, Braun expresses optimism about Indiana’s future and says his concerns for the next generation’s welfare are driving his run for governor. Having served Hoosiers in Washington, he believes that solutions to the state’s issues lie locally, not with “special interests and career politicians in D.C.”
Braun has laid out a 12-point agenda that includes growing Hoosier jobs and the economy; improving education; implementing affordable health care; embracing reliable, affordable and clean energy; preserving agriculture; and cutting taxes while reducing the size of government.
His campaign website also addresses hot-button issues:
- “Put kids first” by “making sure divisive theories like critical race theory or discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity have no place in our public schools.”
- “Protect parental rights”: He will fight to “protect the rights of parents to shield their children from divisive ideologies by ensuring parents have transparent access and meaningful input on curriculum and materials in our schools.”
- “Stand up to woke corporations”: He says, “ESG [environmental, social and governance] puts investors and retirees at financial risk and will have no place in the Indiana state government.”
- “Pro-life means pro-family”: “State lawmakers must work to ensure the gains we have made to protect life are secured and strengthened, while working to help mothers and their infants receive the care and social support they deserve to ensure a healthy start to life.”
- “Standing with law enforcement”: He vows “to make sure the justice system is not failing them [law enforcement] by refusing to detain dangerous criminals, manipulating the bail system, and intentionally refusing to enforce laws based on a political ideology.”
- “Securing our southern border”: Braun explains, “Joe Biden and the left have created a humanitarian and national security crisis on our southern border. [I] will work to fund solutions that keep criminals and drugs, like fentanyl, from entering our country.”
- “Defend our constitutional rights”: “The rights of law-abiding gun owners, the freedom to practice our religion, and the rights of parents to protect their children from leftist ideology are under attack.” He says he “will never waver when it comes to defending every Hoosier’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
- “Election security and reform”: “The right of Americans to cast their vote in fair and secure elections is essential to the survival of our Republic. Hoosiers must trust that our elections are free from fraud and guarantee that every legal vote is counted accurately.”
- “No more mandates or lockdowns”: “The lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic were a disaster for our state and led to business closures, job losses, mental health issues, learning loss, and still failed to protect the most vulnerable. As Governor, Mike Braun will never lockdown our state, mandate masks for our kids, or tell someone their job or business is not essential.”
At the Palladium on March 11, Braun added that the government “came up with the term ‘you’re essential; you’re not essential’” during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I never thought that would happen in our own Hoosier State,” he said. “When you have that type of bureaucratic determination, try to explain that to my wife and all the other merchants in downtown Jasper. They were out of business for a long time. You never know when it’s going to creep into your own state. It was very disappointing.”
Endorsed by Trump
Braun possesses one important element in his primary race: the imprimatur of Donald Trump. “I can tell you that every one of my opponents would have loved to have the endorsement in a state like Indiana,” he said in his Jasper office.
When Trump endorsed Braun, the former president was facing 91 criminal charges in two federal jurisdictions and two in Manhattan and Georgia (since reduced to 88 when three charges were dropped in Atlanta).
“There’s a political intertwining,” Braun said of the charges facing Trump, who the senator has twice voted to acquit during Senate impeachment trials. Following his 2021 acquittal vote, Braun said, “The riot on January 6th was horrific and should be universally condemned, and while I listened to both President Trump’s defense and the House Managers’ arguments, I believe it is unconstitutional to hold a trial to remove a former President from an office he no longer holds and feel a vote to convict would have deep negative implications for the First Amendment and due process.”
“Whether those indictments get parlayed into a conviction, I’m just extrapolating what I see Republican primary voters are doing,” he said. “I don’t think that makes much difference.”
In the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, Sen. Braun was supportive of efforts to challenge Electoral College certification. But after the Trump-inspired mob overran the U.S. Capitol, assaulting more than 150 cops while seeking to hunt down Vice President Mike Pence, Braun reversed course, saying he “didn’t feel comfortable with today’s events.” He said election integrity is “still a valid issue.”
Since Jan. 6, Trump has talked about nullifying the U.S. Constitution and called for the execution of the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley. Does that type of rhetoric concern Braun?
“Obviously, that stuff is not the stuff I would put out there,” he responded during the November tour of his company. “I think that hurts rather than helps the cause because it further polarizes the people that might even like his policies. That’s a difference in approach. I respect everyone’s ability on how they’re going to sell themselves. I would stick on looking at the record in terms of the way it was pre-COVID, and the stuff you can’t change, I don’t know really what the point would be to further talk about it, because you can’t fix it. That toothpaste is out of the tube.”
Wilson of the University of Indianapolis said of Braun: “He’s been able to effectively align himself with Donald Trump. He did that back in 2018, in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate against Todd Rokita and Luke Messer. He was clearly the Trump candidate, and that plays well in Indiana, where Donald Trump has won by 20% in the last few presidential election cycles.”
What type of governor would Braun be?
When Mike Braun served on the local school board, Mitch Daniels was governor. During Braun’s three-year General Assembly tenure, Mike Pence and Eric Holcomb were governors. What did he glean from their leadership styles?
“I’ll be able to distill best practices,” he said. “Look what Mitch Daniels did. He came in 2004, he inherited a budget that was in the red that had been run recently by Democrats. So he had to get the state’s financial cash flowing. And then you look at what he did when he started to address issues. We are the ‘Crossroads of America’ and we weren’t even funding roads the right way. Almost every penny of the fuel tax was being spent on other stuff. He started fixing things that would have been most apparent that needed to be fixed.”
Braun noted that Gov. Daniels wasn’t afraid to spend political capital.
“One reason he did that with good leadership, besides the fact that he’s a brilliant mind, was he was also willing to take risks,” Braun said. “If you’re not willing to take risks, you’re going to be in a broad band of mediocracy, whether it’s in business or government. You don’t want to take on too much; you want to leave your neck intact politically and operationally, and he was willing to do that. I think Pence and Holcomb inherited a much better-run state government and have enhanced it in their own ways since then.
“The difference between me and a Pence or a Holcomb would be [that] I spent my time in the trenches of building a business from scratch,” added Braun, who said he will continue to invite anyone to Jasper on Fridays to talk about issues. “That’s why I took time to show you.”
Statehouse reporter Rory Appleton contributed to this story.
about Braun
- Age: 70
- Hometown: Jasper, Indiana
- Education: Master of Business Administration, Harvard Business School (1978); Wabash College (1976)
- Family: Married to Maureen Braun since 1976, with four children, Ashley, Kristen, Jason and Jeff
- Job: U.S senator from Indiana since 2019
- Work history: Member of the Indiana House of Representatives from the 63rd district from 2014 to 2017; owner of Meyer Distributing (formerly Meyer Body) since the mid-1980s
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Brian Howey is senior writer and columnist for Howey Politics Indiana/State Affairs. Find Howey on Facebook and X @hwypol.
Who is Jamie Reitenour? Indianapolis mom mobilized volunteers to make governor’s ballot
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one in a series of profiles of the candidates running for Indiana governor.
ZIONSVILLE, Ind. — It wasn’t the largest campaign event the 2024 election cycle is likely to see.
About 15 people, some of them children, gathered on a rainy April night at Our Place Coffee, nestled just feet from the watchful eye of Zionsville’s Abraham Lincoln mural. But Republican gubernatorial candidate Jamie Reitenour, an Indianapolis mom with no previous political experience, spoke with every single one of them.
It was one part coffee-and-issues politicking and one part informal Bible study, complete with scripture quiz questions for the kids in attendance.
Reitenour, well-worn Bible in hand, shared her oft-repeated story of being called by God to run for governor about six years ago — a destiny confirmed by friends and strangers alike along the way, she said. This charge, she told the group, would allow her to rise above traditional campaign currency, such as fundraising dollars and polling numbers.
Suzanne and Shon Hough sponsored the event after meeting Reitenour at their shared church, Horizon Christian Fellowship in Lawrence.
“As soon as we met her, we knew this is someone to support,” Suzanne Hough said. “We knew she wasn’t a politician. She was called. She has a love and compassion for people.”
That is how Reitenour has made it this far — how she gathered the 4,500 state-mandated signatures to qualify for the May 7 primary ballot, how she’s made it onto a stage filled with more experienced and wealthier opponents. For more than a year, she’s hosted several small events per week throughout the state, traveling some 35,000 miles, by her count.
The dozen or so latte-sipping supporters had a part to play, the candidate said.
“Go to your contact lists and tell them about our Facebook,” Reitenour said. “We could reach 144 people today if we all did that.”
The call
Reitenour’s purpose changed in 2017 while walking through downtown Indianapolis with her husband, Nathan.
“I just heard a whisper: You’re going to be the governor of Indiana,” Reitenour told State Affairs.
The couple wandered over to the governor’s mansion.
“We looked at it and thought, ‘That does not look like our family,’” she recalled. “So I just put the calling on the shelf.”
Indiana requires gubernatorial candidates to have lived in the state for at least five years. She had only just moved from Michigan.
Reitenour believed the country was in a good spot under then-President Donald Trump. Why would she need to run?
“I just thought about it,” Reitenour said. “Why would the Lord call an ordinary person to something like that when the nation was doing so well? But the reality of scripture is that you see these times where people are called, and you can see the reasons for the calling around them.”
Her regular Bible contemplation soon took her to the Book of Nehemiah, who was a governor. Another sign, she said.
The state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic set off alarm bells for Reitenour, who considered steps like mask requirements an affront to personal liberty. She brings up the subject often, and it made it into her coffeehouse remarks.
“How am I in a conservative state, but I don’t feel free?” she told the crowd.
After COVID-19 and the election of President Joe Biden, Reitenour began to think more seriously about running for governor.
Her mission was affirmed first by a close friend, whom Reitenour said received a similar calling from God to help her candidacy, and then by strangers, whom she said confirmed her destiny during separate chance meetings at a Panera Bread location.
She began to meet with church groups and advocacy organizations that align with her views, including Moms for Liberty and Indiana Right to Life. Despite being referred to as an activist on the campaign trail, Reitenour said she is not part of any activism group.
Getting on the ballot
This network of like-minded supporters would soon serve as the volunteer arm of Reitenour’s campaign.
Indiana requires candidates for governor to collect at least 4,500 signatures from voters, including at least 500 from each of the state’s nine congressional districts. It’s a tall order even for seasoned politicians, who often hire specialized operatives for the task.
“The mystery of how we did that will also be the mystery of how we win,” Reitenour said.
She focused on growing supporters and gathering signatures at each small event she hosted, then mobilizing those attendees to gather still more for her.
“I had a formula in my heart for this that the Lord gave me at 4 a.m. one morning,” she said.
The campaign
Reitenour made the ballot, but she is the least-known candidate in a field that includes Sen. Mike Braun, Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch, former state Attorney General Curtis Hill, former state Secretary of Commerce Brad Chambers and Eric Doden, a Fort Wayne businessman and previous president of the Indiana Economic Development Corp.
She has no previous political experience. She is a stay-at-home mom who also homeschools her five children and volunteers through ministry. Her previous work experience includes compliance management at a mortgage company, secretarial work and even a stint as an assistant coach in women’s field hockey.
Reitenour was selected in the governor’s race by just 2% of respondents in a recent State Affairs/Howey Politics Indiana poll, tying her with Hill for last place behind front-runner Braun (44%). She has consistently polled in the low single digits.
While other gubernatorial candidates can draw from years of campaign fundraising experience or millions in personal finances, Reitenour had raised just a little more than $54,000 as of March 31.
She has thus found herself paddling in a proverbial ocean of campaign spending.
The four top-polling candidates — Braun, Chambers, Doden and Crouch — have spent a combined $20 million.
After participating in the first gubernatorial debate on March 11, Reitenour did not qualify for a March 27 debate hosted by WISH-TV due to her fundraising numbers, as the television station required candidates to have raised $300,000 by December.
She was also excluded from a March 26 Fox59/CBS4 debate for not reaching a 5% polling threshold. She will be included in the final April 23 debate, hosted by the Indiana Debate Commission.
Reitenour has campaigned using a constantly shuffling group of volunteers. She has only one full-time employee: campaign assistant Casey Pierce, who met Reitenour through his mother’s church.
“It just felt like the right thing to do,” Pierce said of joining the campaign. He has never worked in politics before.
Pierce called his initial meeting with Reitenour “a Holy Spirit encounter.”
Reitenour’s platform
Reitenour described education as the state’s “greatest vulnerability,” and thus her primary platform.
“The next generation is not being educated well, and this has been a long time coming,” Reitenour said.
She has received guidance from the Hamilton County chapter of Moms for Liberty, which made national headlines in 2023 after using a quote attributed to Adolf Hitler in its first newsletter. The nonprofit, which pushes against socially minded education reforms like critical race theory, subsequently apologized.
Reitenour likewise opposes ideas like social-emotional learning in classrooms. Her plan also proposes removing technology from grades K-5, calling for private businesses to sponsor classrooms and requiring all students to pursue an apprenticeship before high school graduation.
She also favors an audit of the Indiana Economic Development Corp., tax cuts, a focus on investing in small towns and generally “pointing Indiana in the direction of family.”
The future
At her coffee shop appearance, Reitenour shied away from admitting her long odds in the race.
“The political system is meant to squeeze people out, but I am working against it,” she said.
She pledged to continue organizing no matter the primary election results.
About Reitenour
- Age: 44
- Hometown: Indianapolis
- Education: Psychology degree from Missouri State University
- Family: Married to Nathan Reitenour, with five children, ages 13, 11, 10, 9 and 4
- Job: Stay-at-home mom, homeschool teacher
- Work history: Former compliance manager at Windsor Capital Mortgage, former athletic director at Calvary Christian School (at Calvary Chapel Vista church in California)
Read these related stories
- Eric Doden is running from behind but hopes his ‘bold vision’ will propel him forward
- Suzanne Crouch positions herself as a ‘different’ candidate for the voiceless
- Mike Braun on why he wants to be in politics ‘at a level of significance’
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